You Deserve This
by Hickumu
Summary: Ishida is a being held together with the fire and desire and energy of a dead man's soul. It's not even that he particularly wants to live, it's just that he doesn't want to go to his brother without having seen to it that the one truly responsible for their pain and suffering and despair gets what's coming to him. They all die the same, in the walls of Hope's Peak.


Written as a fill for the Dangan Ronpa kink meme. The prompt was "everyone's favorite Super High School Level Heir winds up the victim of Chapter 3's murder", with the caveat that the fic might just consist of a character fantasizing about his death.

I'm both pleased and not pleased with this one. On the one hand, it was kind of cool to try and get inside Ishida's head - there's a lot there, and it's a scary place. On the other, it was a bit of a rush job, and I feel like I could have done more with this.

Oh, well. If I'd tried to do more, this likely never wouldn't have gotten written in the first place. Sometimes, you just have to throw in the towel.

* * *

It would be _so_, _so_ easy.

If their lives didn't depend on it, would anyone even care?

Ishida doesn't. Ishida is long past caring about much of anything, except nursing the newborn fire in his heart, and keeping his brother safe. And the thought of Togami makes that fire roar and rage like a blazing inferno in anger, _hate_, and he likes that feeling, because it's the only thing keeping back the darkness and the sadness and the deadness, the _uselessness_, that had previously been hanging over him like a shroud, before his brother had given him this great gift.

_It's his fault_, Mondo rages in his head. _That bastard dragged it out! He almost got them all fucking killed! I would have admitted it, you know I would have! But it would have meant breaking my promise...he made me break my promise...he let everyone find out what wasn't their frickin' business...that fucker needs to pay for what he did to him!_

And a man never breaks his promise.

Ishida won't make that same mistake. When it's done, he won't hide. He'll drag the body into the cafeteria, wait for everyone to attend the meetings (_he never attended the meetings, should have known he was shifty from the start_), and then proudly declare that he'd done it. No trial needed. They might all have been traitorous fucks that had betrayed his brothers and let them both die, but he wouldn't hold that against them! They tried their best. They weren't bad kids. Even a delinquent deserved a second change, right? They'd all just snapped under Monobear's pressures.

(_And he'd wanted to be friends, as well as classmates..._)

But not him. He was different. He was worse. He didn't cooperate. He didn't care. He had no spirit - he had something rotten and dead and black inside him where a spirit should have been. He dragged them all down just as hard as Ishimaru had tried to drag them back up.

And what could have been a nice, clean, maybe almost painless trial of Naegi and Kirigiri figuring out the truth without Mondo having to say a word had become...

He sneaks a butcher's knife out of the kitchen. It hadn't worked for Maizono, (_poor girl, he hoped brother hadn't suffered like that_), but if Togami lives long enough to spell out a dying message on the wall, so much the better.

No one thinks twice about it. He can tell they're all hoping for no more death, that maybe everyone else will follow Mondo's example and see that letting Monobear have its way isn't worth it. That thought is almost enough to make Ishida hesitate - is he doing a dishonor to his brother's memory? But then Mondo's voice eggs him on, strengthens his spine, reminds him of the way the bastard had talked to Chihiro, disrespected him, hurt him as much as Mondo had, maybe worse...

And it won't stop there. He can see it in Togami's eyes as he passes the smug bastard in the hallway. Togami's gotten a taste, now. All his talk of playing won't be talk for much longer. If that smug, uncooperative bastard is going to disrespect his brother even further than that, drag his class even lower into depravity, Ishida will stop him.

He dreams. They're good dreams - not the hellish nightmares of the electrified cage, but dreams where he's powerful, in control, protecting his friends rather than sitting on the sidelines watching more of them die.

Ishida hopes he gets his chance in the library. He hopes that, when he brings the knife down, some of the blood gets on the books. Ishimaru would have been horrified at the very idea, but it's not like the bastard ever lets anyone else in there. He's a bully, he keeps people out with cold glances and snide remarks, so what should have been a comfort to his classmates is his personal domain. Better those books be gone forever than left in his hands, letting him keep feeling superior over his equals.

They probably won't even hear him scream. Or, if they do, they won't care.

He'll take care to stab him somewhere not completely vital, so he doesn't die right off. Because Ishida has so much to say to Togami, so very much, and he wants that bastard to _listen_ for once. If it takes him choking on his own blood to do it, well, they'd all tried to be nice to him once before. They'd tried so hard, given him more than he'd deserved for it.

Maybe he'll even understand. Maybe he'll understand what a bully he was, what a jerk, and that's why he's dying. For the good of all. Ishida imagines those cold eyes dawning with realization, with sadness and regret, the final epiphany. He also images Togami begging for his life, or screaming for help, and realizing with his last breath that no one was coming, because either no one heard or no one cared. It didn't matter how much money he had, in here. He had no friends. No one to mourn him or look for him except Fukawa and a murderess, and Fukawa barely showed her face these days (_poor girl, she deserves so much better_).

More than anything, Ishida wanks the heir to die alone and surprised and afraid. Alone, that was it. No mourners at a hundred thousand yen funeral. Just the cold library floor, and the pain in his gut, and the blood on his precious books. They're all equal in here, and they all died just the same in the end. He would die just the same, in the end.

Then it would be over, and he'd go to his aniki with a smile.


End file.
